{"id":3578,"date":"2022-04-01T21:39:59","date_gmt":"2022-04-01T21:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/linksus.net\/seven-decades-later-the-1950-census-bares-its-secrets-the-new-york-times\/"},"modified":"2022-04-01T21:39:59","modified_gmt":"2022-04-01T21:39:59","slug":"seven-decades-later-the-1950-census-bares-its-secrets-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/2022\/04\/01\/seven-decades-later-the-1950-census-bares-its-secrets-the-new-york-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Seven Decades Later, the 1950 Census Bares Its Secrets – The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Federal law kept the answers on millions of census forms secret for 72 years. The forms went online on Friday, a bonanza for historians, genealogists and the merely curious.
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By <\/span>Michael Wines<\/a><\/span>
WASHINGTON \u2014 At 12:01 a.m. on Friday, precisely 72 years after enumerators began knocking on the doors of some 46 million American houses and apartments, the federal government made public what they learned: the ages, incomes, addresses, ancestry and a trove of other facts about the 150.7 million people who were counted in the 1950 census.
Those millions of census forms, painstakingly filled out by hand in ink, were posted online<\/a> by the National Archives and Records Administration, which by law has kept them private until now. The records, searchable by name and address, offer an intimate look at a nation on the cusp of the modern era \u2014 for the merely curious, a glimpse of the life parents or grandparents led, but for historians and genealogists, a once-in-a-decade bonanza of secrets unveiled.
\u201cThis is the Super Bowl and the Olympics combined, and it\u2019s only every 10 years \u2014 it\u2019s awesome stuff,\u201d Matt Menashes, the executive director of the National Genealogical Society<\/a>, said in an interview. \u201cWhat\u2019s so great about these points of data is that it helps you paint a picture \u2014 not just relationships, but what society was like.\u201d
The last release of similar data was in 2012, when the National Archives made details of the 1940 census public. The government has imposed a 72-year ban on the release of census records since 1952, when the Census Bureau turned over to the National Archives<\/a> all the data it had collected since the first census in 1790.
The searchable data being released includes not just census forms, but also counts of Native Americans who were tallied on separate Indian Reservation Schedules.
The broad outlines of the 1950 census results<\/a> have long been public, of course, reflecting the burst of economic and population expansion in a nation flush with optimism after victory in World War II. The United States had grown by nearly 15 percent in just one decade, and nearly one in 10 people lived in New York. Nevada, with just 160,000 residents, was the least populous state.
The baby boom was in full swing: 3.6 million children were born that year, some 18,000 more than in 2020, when the nation\u2019s population was more than twice as large. The average family earned $3,300<\/a> \u2014 about $38,800 in 2022 dollars.
It was a time when gasoline cost 18 cents a gallon. Interstate highways were but a gleam in future President Eisenhower\u2019s eye. Milton Berle\u2019s \u201cTexaco Star Theater\u201d was such a runaway television hit<\/a> that movie houses closed for lack of business during its Tuesday evening time slot, even though fewer than one in 10 households even owned a television.
About 140,000 census-takers, or enumerators, fanned out across the country that April for what would be the last complete house-to-house canvass; the next census in 1960 was conducted largely by mail.
Compared to the nine questions<\/a> asked in the 2020 head count, the 1950 list was exhaustive \u2014 up to 38 questions<\/a>, from mundane queries about age, sex and race to deeper dives into people\u2019s occupations, incomes, military status, education and ancestry. Married women were asked how many children they had borne, and children born between January and April of 1950 were tallied on special \u201cinfant cards\u201d<\/a> \u2014 another 17 questions long.
The infant cards were not retained. But answers from the census forms were coded onto punch cards and tabulated, for the first time ever, on a UNIVAC I computer, 16,000 pounds and 5,000 vacuum tubes of calculating muscle. Then the census forms were photographed, transferred to nearly 6,400 microfilm rolls and shipped to the National Archives for a 72-year rest.
The rolls contain only the front side of the census forms. The reverse, which held answers to a litany of questions about the condition of places where respondents lived, were not preserved.
The images being released on Friday are digitized versions of the microfilm records that have been scanned with special optical character recognition software to locate and translate handwritten names and addresses into searchable text. Mistakes are inevitable, and the National Archives is asking those who view the forms to report errors<\/a>.
Leading genealogical groups, however, are not waiting for corrections to trickle in. The for-profit genealogical firm Ancestry.com plans to immediately download and scan the census forms using its own character-recognition software. Then Family Search, <\/a>a nonprofit group sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, intends to marshal volunteers to inspect and correct the results, a process that is likely to take several months.
\u201cWe have about 400,000 volunteers that index records all the time,\u201d said David E. Rencher, the chief genealogical officer at Family Search. \u201cFor a project like this, where we rally the community, we\u2019ll get a bump, probably several hundred thousand, just to do this.\u201d
That army is but one indicator of the national fascination with tracing family histories, a passion that Mr. Menashes traces to the 1977 television mini-series \u201cRoots,\u201d<\/a> which explored the journey from enslavement to freedom of the ancestors of the author Alex Haley. The program dovetailed with the dawn of the computer era and with it, the ability to search literally billions of genealogical records online.
Experts in the field call genealogical records an important window on history. But deep down, they say, the records scratch an itch among most people to learn about their predecessors, uncover surprises and locate the occasional black sheep.
\u201cEverybody has a natural curiosity about family history,\u201d said Mr. Rencher. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t mean you want to become a family historian. But there needs to be a place where you can go when you\u2019re curious and say, \u2018I wonder what my family was doing in 1950?\u2019\u201d
Taneya Koonce, president of the Nashville chapter of the Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society, said she would be online early Friday looking for records of her grandparents, who lived in North Carolina. But she said the 1950 records are likely to be of special interest to many African Americans because they help document the great migration of Black families from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North.
\u201cThe census is such an important foundational body of information to have when you\u2019re doing family history,\u201d she said. \u201cYou can explore what was going on in the neighborhood at the time, how much income the family was bringing in, where a person was born.\u201d
Mr. Menashes said the new records would provide his first look at his parents, who were young children in New York City in 1950. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s interesting, first of all, to know their addresses,\u201d he said. \u201cNew York\u2019s archives have this wonderful imagery of streetscapes in the \u201940s and \u201950s. It\u2019s amazing to be able to connect an address to what a place looked like.\u201d
And Mr. Rencher, who was adopted, said he will try to fill in blank spots about his birth family in Pennsylvania.
\u201cThere are still things about the 1950s that are a mystery to me,\u201d he said. \u201cI have a half-sibling out there somewhere. Who knows?\u201d
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